1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technology for notifying a user of a message received from another terminal.
2. Related Art
As a message transmitting and receiving apparatus that transmits and receives messages, and notifies a user of a message received from another terminal, there is, for example, an information terminal device (referred to, hereinafter, as a message transmitting and receiving apparatus) disclosed in JP-A-2007-255908. The message transmitting and receiving apparatus described in JP-A-2007-255908 attaches navigation information to a message inputted by a user and transmits the message. The navigation information is information related to an arbitrary location set by user input. The navigation information includes various types of information related to a location, such as a destination, a location on a route, the current location, other arbitrary locations designated by the user, or and a guidance route to a destination.
A message transmitting and receiving apparatus on the receiving side receives the transmitted data. The message transmitting and receiving apparatus then displays the message together with a map image on a display. The map image corresponds to the navigation information included in the transmitted data.
The message transmitting and receiving apparatus described in JP-A-2007-255908 has a so-called chat function that enables messaging among a plurality of users in real-time. The chat function is used to transmit information including as greetings, such as “Good job!”, and other various types of content.
Among the messages exchanged among users, compared to greetings such as “Good job!”, some messages have a stronger correlation to elements such as location, time, and weather. For example, a message that prompts caution during driving, such as “Watch out for pedestrians here”, is strongly correlated with the location indicated by “here” in the message. Therefore, the information contained in the message is more effectively used if the user is notified of the message while in a position where caution is actually needed (in other words, a position near the location indicated by “here”), rather than when the user is notified while in a position relatively far from the location indicated by “here”.
In other words, the user is preferably notified of a message that includes content indicating a certain situation, such as a location, time, or weather, at a timing at which the situation indicated by the message is occurring or is about to occur.
In the message transmitting and receiving apparatus described in JP-A-2007-255908, when a message is received, the user on the receiving side receives notification of the message at the time of reception. After the notification accompanying reception is performed, even when a situation occurs in which the message becomes more useful to the user than at the time of reception, notification is not performed at this time. Therefore, if there is a time lag from when the message is received to when the situation occurs in which the message becomes more useful to the user than at the time of reception, the user may no longer remember the information in the message.